Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 66:1 (NA 2015)
Article: Human Dignity And Human Justice Thinking With Calvin About The "Imago Dei"
Author: Joan Lockwood O’Donovan

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Human Dignity And Human Justice
Thinking With Calvin About The Imago Dei

Joan Lockwood O’Donovan

([email protected])

Summary

This article explores Calvin’s theological treatment of the Biblical doctrine of humankind’s creation in and restoration to ‘the image of God’, and draws out the critical implications of his treatment for the contemporary elaboration of an ‘inherent human dignity’ in terms of ‘human (subjective) rights’ as the moral foundation of a public justice of secular, egalitarian rights. The argument is that Calvin locates the created and restored ‘image’ in active Trinitarian and Christological relations of divine and human knowing and loving, and not in any immanent or self-standing human structure, quality, or capacity, and in so doing renders theologically problematic an elaboration of ‘inherent human dignity’ in terms of subjective rights. Moreover, his account of public justice, being rooted in, ordered to, and limited by these divine-human relationships, is incompatible with a secular rights polity.

1. Introduction

Over the last sixty-five years, the term ‘human dignity’ has proved to be one of the most slippery, as well as pervasive, terms of a global political discourse that has been decisively shaped by the international documents on human rights emanating from the United Nations.1 The slipperiness of the term, I have argued elsewhere,2 has arisen in part

TynBull 66:1 (2015) p. 122

from the failure of the primary UN documents to give a determinate conceptual content to ‘inherent human dignity’ independent of the universal human possession of ‘equal and inalienable rights’,3 thereby facilitating (intentionally or inadvertently) the global influence of a western liberal tradition of conceiving the dignity of human persons in terms of their possession of ‘equal and inalienable rights’. The still dominant liberal contractarian tradition of natural rights locates the inherent dignity of the individual in his moral freedom understood as the agent’s ownership and rational government of his own acts, as well as of his spiritual and physical resources. Thus understood, the individual’s moral freedom is the original right of self-disposal through rational choice upon which all other rights depend.

Unsurprisingly, theologians across denominational boundaries have responded to this conceptual vagueness of the UN documents by explicating human dignity in terms of the Biblical doctrine of the imago Dei: the ...

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